Lesson #4. Gentle Piano: Sight-Reading tips

Numbers. In our program, numbers are extremely important. Every beginner, whilst developing new skills, leaves their own personal trail of numbers. Using this unique set of figures, it is possible to understand what level you are at now and what steps you need to take next. Please keep a record of all your number scores and share your personal results chart with us. By looking at these numbers we can tell you how well you are progressing. As you get familiar with the program, you will soon learn how to evaluate your charts without our help – it really is simple!

With Soft Mozart, learning takes place even in the time between lessons. Our software has been designed to create special 'programs' in your mind. Once you have played the games and 'installed' these 'programs', they start working to your advantage by helping to filter all the musical information in your environment into different 'channels'. By using these established 'channels' as the foundation for your learning, and building on them with supported learning, the knowledge that you gain is firmly rooted in your mind.

Once you have learned how to sight-read notes and coordinate all ten fingers, you will find it very hard to forget how to do so. We use the principle of 'little and often' to set small, easily reached goals. Rather than giving generalized and abstract statements like “now we are going to study rhythm” or “now we are going to play some songs”, we set a concrete goal: “we are going to play 'Ode to Joy' twice and we will write down and compare the numbers.”